Does anyone else use GENSURF?

[whirlingdervish]

I found this program over on Rust the other day and I've been experimenting to see what I can do with it...
it has some nifty features like using randomized fractals to make bumpy ground and using a monochrome bitmap image as a template for the elevations to generate a customized 3d surface ...


As long as you download the stand-alone program, it should work for you Quark heads out there...

tarot.telefragged.com/gensurf/

I was amazed at how much easier it makes creating a natural looking landscape in Q2..

[glow=red,2,300]Cautions:[/glow]
Try and keep it simple or your map may take a long time to Vis and Light... too many polys can really hurt.

Using these caused Quark to throw a couple more "leaf portal saw into leaf" warnings during the build, due to the many wierd angles you get with highly detailed terrain.. (stupid floating point math)
make sure you've got your hint brushes handy if it causes any gameplay errors...

[Derimok]

Gensurf is ok, but i perfer Nems terrain generator

nemesis.thewavelength.net/index.php?p=9

I personally use the older version of this program.

[grieve[Q2C]]

whenever I tested it, it produced so many light anomalies that the terrain was useless.

as far as I know, you should use a bsp compiler for it which knows "HINTDETAIL" - brushes, to prevent nasty face splits when the bsp is created.

wonder if this has something to do with these light anomalies.
people have done reasonable terrain with GenSurf, but it does not work very well for me.
I think it's obsolete anyway.

Nem's Terrain generator is it's successor.

[whirlingdervish]

I just downloaded it... Gonna test it out tonight after I throw the
dotNetFix on my win98 comp. Hope it doesn't hurt anything!

support for "hintdetail" brushes?

I've been using Quark 6.4 with the new Arghrad beta, and a recently released(2005), enhanced set of qbsp and qvis tools by some guys named: Geoffrey DeWan and Peter Brett
peter-b.co.uk/
home.insightbb.com/~gryndehl/

they work pretty well but I'm not sure what kinda support they have for hint/detail brushes

Anyone noted any difficulties with Nemmy's terrain generator? Or is it spotless?
looks pretty slick from what I can see on the website..

[grieve[Q2C]]

tarot.telefragged.com/gensurf/hints/hints.htm

"hintdetail" brushes are easy to use in the editor, just set the hint and the detail flag together.

but the bsp tool must understand them too.
Geoffrey DeWans qbsp3 should do this.

I really wonder why GenSurf terrain always looked so crappy when I tried it.

well ... duh

[whirlingdervish]

I didn't set the level of detail very high when I used it..
ie.. fewer big brushes instead of lots of small ones...
So it looked alright... but not spectacular.. it's not the smoothest ground I've ever seen
but I haven't tried the "use .bmp file as waveform" option out with anything to detailed either..
just solid color changes, no gradients.. Didn't notice any visible anomilies in the bsp when I tested it... I'm probably just a lucky bastard.

[orange]

quark 6.5 has a few new features, one of those is a terrain maker

i havent messed with it yet, so i dont know if its any good

[Rab,d]

I have used Gensurf with some success. I used a greyscale topographical image to produce the terrain. I did encounter a large number of light anomalies, like black faces. Fortunately the map is set in a snowy land. So i left it as a full bright(no rad) and it looks great.
I also use Quark 6.5 and have used the terrain generator extensively. It's great.
You have to use terrain generated stuff sparingly, for the sake of r_speeds. But it can produce curved surfaces that would take a master of the triagle method to match the results of the terrain generator.

[grieve[Q2C]]

well, this is something of a confirmation that other people have also problems with light anomalies in gensurf - generated terrain.



leaving the map fullbright, on the other side, is definitely a most effective cure for that.



apart from that, your screenshot looks really awesome.
the D-Day mod seems to have a lot of good stuff.
never downloaded/installed it, but now I'll look for it.




downloading the main archive right now.

hmm, site is no longer updated, and maps section is completely gone ?
where do you post your maps ?

[whirlingdervish]

thx for the input rabid.

the fullbright fix is one I don't think I would have ever come up with on my own..

I agree with Grieve: your map looks really nice.
and this dday mod looks cool. I take it there are no cheesy weapons and
other spam-mod BS... Where do you download it?

[Rab,d]

whirlingdervish said:

thx for the input rabid.

the fullbright fix is one I don't think I would have ever come up with on my own..

I agree with Grieve: your map looks really nice.
and this dday mod looks cool. I take it there are no cheesy weapons and
other spam-mod BS... Where do you download it?

Hey. Yeah, i didn't even think about you guys maybe diggin' dday. ;]
It's a great mod. Almost 7 years old now. All the original devs are gone. But, new teams have formed. We recently released a new .dll. The Polish Army. All new wepoans and player models. A campaign of 5 maps. and another small campaign of 3 maps. I made a one map for that and did the lighting on 2 others in the campaign. We are currently working on an Italian team.
One neat thing about dday is Iron sight. No crosshairs, folks. The weapon model has sights on it that you aim with.
Accurate models and other great stuff. I still play it rather than CS or any other wwii game. ;]
But, we are a dwindling community. ;[
So yeah! Come play.
Here are our forums: ddc.planetquake.gamespy.com/board/index.php
You can find everything there. ;D

[Rab,d]

grieve said:

well, this is something of a confirmation that other people have also problems with light anomalies in gensurf - generated terrain.



leaving the map fullbright, on the other side, is definitely a most effective cure for that.



apart from that, your screenshot looks really awesome.
the D-Day mod seems to have a lot of good stuff.
never downloaded/installed it, but now I'll look for it.




downloading the main archive right now.

hmm, site is no longer updated, and maps section is completely gone ?
where do you post your maps ?

The fullbright works with that snow map cuz it's naturally bright. Kinda like full ambient really. I doubt it would suffice fir any other map, unfortunately. This map is all outdoors. But if i were to have a bunker or building to go in...i would lose the chance to light it. I am trying to find the cure!
I have spent hours on a piece of terain only to scrape it becuase it looks like shit, lit.
Here's a few screenies of my map poldday1. ;]



Did i see another thread about trees? ;D You can climb this one. This map works in regualr quake2 mode. But it would only have one spawn point and no items. But you could run around it. ;]

[whirlingdervish]

dude its gorgeous. I'll bet there are a couple mappers around here who would gladly
help you port it to quake2 DM...(myself included) a little vis blocking and I think this map would
rock for free-for-all DM.
wep. placement and spawns shouldn't take long to add.
you got it in .map format?

[Rab,d]

whirlingdervish said:

dude its gorgeous. I'll bet there are a couple mappers around here who would gladly
help you port it to quake2 DM...(myself included) a little vis blocking and I think this map would
rock for free-for-all DM.
wep. placement and spawns shouldn't take long to add.
you got it in .map format?

Hey man! Thx. I would be willing to give it over to you guys.
Actually i am just about to release a patch to the .dll that this belongs to. The patch will include a new version of this map. I tweaked it out. I did a lot of texture alignment/wrapping. It looks better now.
I'll post the dl link here when i release the patch in the next day or so. I'll put a .map file in there you can extract. You may like the textures, models and sprites i have in there, too. Feel free to take/use what you wish.
On that note. I may be able to bring an entity we use in dday to you guys. misc_model. I have it in use in this map. You should be able to copy and paste it from the .map.